Saturday, June 1, 2013

A NONEXCLUSIVE LIST:Of things with which Vin Diesel has more chemistry during Fast & Furious Six than Michelle Rodriguez, his ostensible "true love:"

Paul Walker

The Rock

Luke Evans (who plays the villain, a mercenary named Hobbs)

A bullet he removes from his body by himself without aid of anesthesia.

The white T-shirt and tank top that serve as his costume for much of the movie.

Each and every car he drives during the course of the movie.

The toy car he gives to his infant nephew early in the movie.

(Despite this flaw and that the plot makes little or no sense--there's at least one point where a sniper has a bead on the villain and decides not to shoot for no apparent reason--I still had quite an enjoyable time.)

GERONIMO! Matt Smith will be leaving the role of The Doctor with this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special, though head writer Steven Moffat and Jenna-Louise Coleman's Clara will apparently be staying on. Are we equipped to speculate on who'll be replacing him? How about one of the kids from Harry Potter? There'd been speculation for years of a female Doctor incarnation, and Emma Watson could be an interesting choice to lend star power to get over the hump of making that sort of radical change.

SMELFUNGUS TIME: There's something that's always going to be satisfying about a National Spelling Bee when the winner is someone for whom we've rooted over the years, where the victory feels not just like one night's triumph but the culmination of years of hard work and frustration paying off. When you get the added narrative satisfaction of overcoming a personal demon (Germanic roots) and an array of joyous championship finalists who are fun to watch, it's even better.

The Bee, however, is also the process of eliminating 280 other fine spellers, so your enjoyment of this week's competition is directly tied to how that was accomplished as well. Actually, wait a second: the Bee doesn't exist for our enjoyment: it exists for the kids who are competing in it, so as I've said before the question of whether these computer-based cutoffs are appropriate is really one for them as competitors more than for us as observers. From this outsider's perspective, it does seem more fair to have evaluations based on 24 (and 24 more) common words rather than the luck of the draw at the microphone, and more compassionate to not have every eliminated speller have to suffer that fate in front of a camera—but that also renders the Bee a test of slightly different skills than the traditional oral-only evaluation.

Still, what might be fair for the first cutoff (from 281 minus two oral rounds to the sub-50 for Thursday) does seem more painful when it comes to artificially cutting down from 18 to 11 for primetime. Assuming for sake of television that there will be a separate primetime competition, would it have been that difficult to calibrate the word list to have an additional round or two to winnow the field from 18 down to 9-12? Would it have been impossible to go into primetime with 12-15 spellers and just make it more difficult from the get-go? (The first primetime round always seems easier than the afternoon rounds which preceded it.) And if they started with 6-9 kids in primetime once every few years, is that the worst thing in the world?

I'm still ambivalent about this. When you look at the individual vocabulary words on which errors helped eliminate four of the seven kids from the finals (ebullient, parsimonious, fractography, and filiferous), yes, those are words which the Bee champion should be able to define in a multiple-choice quiz, and those are kids who accordingly probably wouldn't, and shouldn't, have won this competition. The kids who made it to primetime last night, earned it, and the duration of the final rounds is a testament to the uniform quality of the spellers who made it. From that perspective, it's a fair evaluation, even more fair than a random selection from a list of know-it-or-you-don't words (origin: Basque, proper name, literary character, etc.) ... except that the ability to pull those rabbits out of hats which most amazes and impresses us.

So I don't have an answer to how to better structure the Bee. I'd prefer that it be done with the consideration of putting the spellers' needs first, and the fairest evaluation of and reward for their hard work, and not based on what's best for ESPN's scheduling needs ... but I'm afraid that's not the world in which we live.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE: It is happening. And honestly
people? I am so excited that it’s almost
sad. This is my SuperBowl. This is my Day. Welcome to the Scripps National Spelling
Bee. The Semifinals are about to begin
at 2 pm EST (on ESPN2 if you want to watch and who doesn’t want to watch?) and
I’ll be live-blogging old-school style as best I can from my office here at
Scandal on the Sunset-Gower lot where I’m totally supposed to be breaking
stories for Season 3 but I can’t because children are spelling.

CHILDREN ARE SPELLING.

What I love about the Bee is its celebration of
intelligence. The Bee at its best is a dance
party for braininess, a nerdgasm for smarty-pants. The Bee is home for those of us who maybe can
not throw a ball or run without our inhalers.
The Bee is a place for people who like to read, who enjoy math, who love
science and art and geography and words,
words, words. The Bee is for people who
have plans that do not include being a Real Housewife of Anything. The Bee is the only way our people will ever
be on ESPN. And that makes the Bee awesome.

The Bee is a celebration.

Sadly, it is also a competition. There are 42 semifinalists spelling
today. Only one will win (yeah, there’s
a teeny possibility of co-champions but let's not even think about that). ONLY ONE WILL WIN.

MORNING AT THE BEE: This is very strange, having no spelling going on this morning. Why are the semifinal rounds in the afternoon, giving the kids minimal break time before the finals, rather than now?

uh-PAH-fuh-gee: It's like that thing of where there's a small hollow curvature at the top or bottom of the shaft of a column.

BOOM-slahng, BOOM-slang: Snake from Southern Africa.

krip-tahm-NEE-zhuh: It's like that thing of where you remember something only you don't realize you're remembering it and think you're being conscious of it for the first time.

dih-jehr-AH-tee: nerds

YOU-tuh-lee: It's like that thing of where your body is made up of a constant number of cells.

ji-ro-KAH-tuh-lid: worm (ji rhyming with eye, to be clear)

kah-fee-KLOTCH, koh-fee-KLUTCH: It's like that thing of where someone else takes the last cinnamon roll and you have to sit around and listen to other people talking too much.

mehr-tench-EE-uh, mehr-ten(t)-SEE-uh: also known as the Virginia cowslip, which I'm sure is a euphemism for something.

ah-no-mah-SEE-oh-luh-gee: study of grouped words

puh-hoo-tuh-KA-wuh: a curvaceous New Zealand tree.

te-KWIST-lah-TAY-kuhn: a particular language family deriving from Mexico.

The twelve vocab words were slightly less onerous -- I'll assume you can use dilettante, enigmatic, lionize, and sangroid in a sentence, but what about anacouluthon, gossalgia, hyalescent, keratectomy, sedulous, telluria, vitrine, and xylophagous?

TIME FLIES: Has it really been five years since we first met speller Catherine Cojocaru? She hit primetime in 2008, and since then has been a regular member of our community during Bee season. She'll be back for the live coverage tonight, and in the meantime files this update on how she's doing:

THE 2013 SPELLING BEE POOL: Forty-two spellers remain. Our rules are similar to last year's -- with two five-timers (Cundey, Keeton) and five four-timers (Remmer, Born, Hathwar, Mahankali, and Reddy) returning among the semifinalists, as well as two returning prime-timers, I'm going to restrict the use of veterans again.

So: pick two spellers, only one of whom can be one of the four- or five-timers listed above. While individual spellers can be used more than once, you cannot repeat the same pairing that someone else has already submitted. First come, first served, and you cannot choose a speller once s/he spells tomorrow afternoon. You will get one point for each word your spellers correctly spell during tomorrow's rounds of the Bee, which resumes at 2pm eastern on ESPN2. In addition, each speller will receive an additional point for reaching primetime, to account for the computer-based cutoff after tomorrow afternoon's two live rounds. Most points wins; tiebreaker will be whoever has the individual speller going the furthest.

I-O-Q-R-Z-QUATRO: Welcome back to the microphone,Meghana Giri, as Round 3 begins with 266 spellers remaining.

2:07 pm: Seven kids down so far out of the first 60 spellers. It's a slightly harder round, but not impossibly so. Still, 200+ kids will spell both words correctly today, and only ~50 of them get to move on to tomorrow.

2:47 pm: Sometimes you get "reconcilable," "discrete," or "dowager"; sometimes you get "mussitation" or "piloncillo." Life ain't fair.

MEGHANA GIRI OF ALABAMA, COME ON DOWN! You are the first speller up to the microphone in today's Round 2, and your word is glahz-nost. (And you are correct!)

There are two preliminary rounds today in which all 281 spellers will face the microphone, Dr. Jacques Bailly, and the cameras of ESPN3 online (in both "play along" and more aggressively chyroned versions). Spellers receive 3 points for each word spelled correctly today; add that number to yesterday's written round score, and the top up-to-50 spellers advance to the semifinals tomorrow. Get dinged today, and you're out.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

"Under Pressure," the number from Smash which opened the show's series finale. Should people on the streets in future generations ask you "what went wrong?", focus on Debra Messing's line readings to understand the gaps between what this show could have been, thought it was, and ultimately was.

WELCOME TO NATIONAL HARBOR: This morning, two hundred eighty-one of the brightest English-speaking kids in the world will begin the fulfillment of months and years of preparation for the National Spelling Bee, not in front of a microphone but in front of a computer. There, for the first time in Bee history they will be tested in both vocabulary and spelling -- twenty-five words in each section -- with the results having a heavy weight on who will advance after tomorrow's two live rounds. (added: Picture!)

This is now the eleventh year I've been live-blogging the Bee, and as in years past, we're here to celebrate these great kids, to be amazed by what they can do, and to occasionally mock the Bee when the kid from Ghana has to spell the name of the Passover ritual meal, or seven Canadians go down in a row, or when there's a run of words derived from Afrikaans that we just can't believe.

What we won't do is mock the kids, or presume we can learn anything meaningful about them or their parents based on the brief slices we see on tv. As my favorite line from Frost/Nixon goes, "The first and greatest sin or deception of television is that it simplifies, it diminishes. Great, complex ideas, tranches of time. Whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot." We will try to be modest about what we believe we're seeing; the only thing we can know for sure is whether the word is spelled correctly, and what we learn from former spellers thereafter.

Indeed, we've been blessed to have so manygreatformercompetitors join us during Bee Week to share their experiences over the years. (Y'all are welcome back.) Shonda will be returning again, as well.

I feel terribly old-school in still doing this on the blog -- there's an argument that the world has shifted, and we ought to just go to Twitter full-time for the Bee. But I appreciate the Bee-loving community that we create here for one week every May, and if that remains sustainable I'm going to do it.

Disclaimers:Nothing on this weblog has been authorized by or represents the views of our employers. Any effort to impute any views expressed here to them is just plain wrong.Nothing on this blog constitutes legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult with your attorney. If your need for legal advice persists for longer than 3 hours, see a medical professional. If that medical professional screws up, seek legal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.All prices and specifications subject to change without notice.This website has been modified from its original version.It has been formatted to fit your screen.

This website may contain forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements present management's expectations, beliefs, plans and objectives regarding future financial performance, and assumptions or judgments concerning such performance. Any discussions contained in this website, except to the extent that they contain historical facts, are forward-looking and accordingly involve estimates, assumptions, judgments and uncertainties. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those addressed in the forward-looking statements. This website is meant for educational purposes only. Substantial penalty for early withdrawal. The management has always had the right to edit or delete any comments he sees fit, and will use such right for abusive or irrelevant remarks. If you want free speech, start your own blog; this one's taken. No passes accepted for this engagement. Price does not include taxes, title, destination charges, or dealer prep. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead or otherwise is purely coincidental. Lost ticket pays maximum rate. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this website without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is encouraged.